LaTeX tools for life scientists (BioTeXniques?)

Kumar M Senthil

Abstract

LaTeX has been a long time favorite of mathematicians and
physicists alike. However now, many packages are available, that have
tremendously extended the capabilities of LaTeX beyond routine typesetting
and provide biologists new avenues to not only typeset documents, but also help
in the visualization of membrane proteins and in the analysis of DNA or amino
acid sequences by multiple sequence alignment. I will discuss with examples
some of the \LaTeX\ packages and tools that are presently available for the
biologists. Scientific journals (for biological research) now accept
\TeX/\LaTeX\ formatted manuscripts, although they are still a rarity. This
article will provide the references of those sources that might be helpful to
prospective authors from life sciences that want to submit manuscripts in
\TeX/\LaTeX\ format. This article is written in the perspective of a biologist
who might be interested in creating better documents using LaTeX & friends.

Senthil finished his PhD work on

Gene regulation in very late
promoters of Baculovirus

, from the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting &
Diagnostics (http://www.cdfd.org.in {CDFD}), India. He claims to have
written his entire PhD thesis, armed with nothing but Emacs + AUCTeX, LaTeX
and a toothbrush. He is currently working as a